Every Recreational or Medical dispensary needs to have a menu available to their customers. Most owners use Leafly or Weedmaps to provide their menu to there customers as an alternative to an in-house dispensary software system. Others use third-party websites that display their menu to customers after they are taking away from the main dispensary site. Both of these options are costing you money and customers for the following reasons.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a term used by search engine optimization experts to describe how long a customer stays on your website. The length of time a user stays on your website is measured by Google to determine if the customer found what they are looking for. For example, let’s say a customer searches for German Sheppard’s and then click on the first link they see. If the user does not like the results they will click back and click on the next link. When Google measures that a customer did not find what they wanted they will list that website lower in rankings. When you use a third party menu for your website customers will immediately leave your site and go to the menu website which skyrockets your bounce rate and causes your website to listed lower costing you customers and revenue. Consider this. The first listing in Google gets 44 percent of all the clicks. The second position gets 12 percent of the clicks and it continues to drop like a rock. If 1000 customers search for Marijuana Dispensary in your city can you afford to have 450 of them going to your competition? A Google Engineer defines bounce rate as (I came I saw and I puked). And that is how the search algorithms rank your site when it sees 80 percent of your traffic going to a third part dispensary software menu system like Leafly and others.

The other important metric that Google measures is the duration of time that a user spends on your website. The easiest way to visualize this metric is to understand that Google makes its money by providing the most relevant websites to what users are actually searching for. When a user goes to a crappy website they don’t spend much time there. When they find a website with good content and is relevant to their search they STAY on that site longer. Makes sense right? So when your customers find your site and then they stay for 3 seconds and then spend 5 to 10 minutes browsing an offsite menu it will be your website that takes the punishment. Google Analytics is a tool used by search engine optimization experts to check the health of your site. Take a look at the first thing Google tracks for a particular website.

Your Menu Items are Not Indexed by Google

The second big problem with the two primary solutions is your individual products are not indexed into googles search engines because they are on another website. For example, let us say a customer in San Diego types Blue Dream in San Diego. If that word Blue Dream is not on your website your business will not show up in the search rankings. Now multiply that by thousands of products and you can see how that can quickly add up to lost business. With our menu system, every one of your products will be searchable through Google and other search engines because those keywords reside directly on your website.

Here is a direct example below of one of our clients who has all the hundreds of products indexed by Google. If a customer searches for Sin Mint Trim in Tacoma THERE website will now come up first. Before that customer would of went to the dispensary listed below it and not found our clients shop at all. 70 percent of all internet searches are long tail only 30 percent of searches are short words like Tacoma dispensary.

Refresh Rate

Another metric that Google uses to rank websites is how often the site updates its web pages. The more often the website is updated the higher it will show up in Google Rankings. Google crawls websites on a set time base and looks for changes. The more often your content changes the more Google will crawl it and rank it higher than stale websites who don’t change their content at all or rarely.

Content

30 percent of Google searches are what we call short tail keywords like Dispensary, Marijuana Shop, Weed Store, the other 70 percent of searches are called long tail keywords like Best weed store close to me, or Cheap Marijuana ounces in Los Angeles. You can never optimize your site to catch all these keywords but what you can do is add content. There is a famous saying when it comes to getting your website ranked higher than your competitors and that saying is CONTENT IS KING!. The more content your website has the higher it will rank in search engines. One of the easiest ways to get free content is through comments by your customers. Our custom dispensary menu solution allows users to leave comments about each of the products your store carries. The more comments the more free content your website receives and the higher it will rank in search engines.